drunk, but not as we are, temporally; nor can his sleep then cure him, for the fumes of his ambition make his very soul reel, and that small beer that should allay him (silence) keeps him more surfeited, and makes his heat break out in private houses.  Women and lawyers are his best disciples; the one, next fruit, longs for forbidden doctrine, the other to maintain forbidden titles, both which he sows amongst them.  Honest he dare not be, for that loves order; yet, if he can be brought to ceremony and made but master of it, he is converted.

A MERE COMMON LAWYER

Is the best shadow to make a discreet one show the fairer.  He is a materia prima informed by reports, actuated by statutes, and hath his motion by the favourable intelligence of the Court.  His law is always furnished with a commission to arraign his conscience; but, upon judgment given, he usually sets it at large.  He thinks no language worth knowing but his Barragouin:  only for that point he hath been a long time at wars with Priscian for a northern province.  He imagines that by sure excellency his profession only is learning, and that it is a profanation of the Temple to his Themis dedicated, if any of the liberal arts be there admitted to offer strange incense to her.  For, indeed, he is all for money.  Seven or eight years squires him out, some of his nation less standing; and ever since the night of his call, he forgot much what he was at dinner.  The next morning his man (in actu or potentia) enjoys his pickadels.  His laundress is then shrewdly troubled in fitting him a ruff, his perpetual badge.  His love-letters of the last year of his gentlemanship are stuffed with discontinuances, remitters, and uncore priests; but, now being enabled to speak in proper person, he talks of a French hood instead of a jointure, wags his law, and joins issue.  Then he begins to stick his letters in his ground chamber-window, that so the superscription may make his squireship transparent.  His heraldry gives him place before the minister, because the Law was before the Gospel.  Next term he walks his hoopsleeve gown to the hall; there it proclaims him.  He feeds fat in the reading, and till it chance to his turn, dislikes no house order so much as that the month is so contracted to a fortnight.  Amongst his country neighbours he arrogates as much honour for being reader of an Inn of Chancery, as if it had been of his own house; for they, poor souls, take law and conscience, Court and Chancery, for all one.  He learned to frame his case from putting riddles and imitating Merlin’s prophecies, and to set all the Cross Row together by the ears; yet his whole law is not able to decide Lucan’s one old controversy betwixt Tau and Sigma.  He accounts no man of his cap and coat idle, but who trots not the circuit.  He affects no life or quality for itself, but for gain; and that, at least, to the stating him in a Justice of Peace-ship,